Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  Fox’s work was much in evidence on that steamy 1996 tour of Thailand, along with dresses by Jon Moore, who had taken over as design director of the Hardy Amies label following the founder’s retirement.**

  On a tour of somewhere as colourful as Thailand, a designer could have something of a free rein with colours – with royal ensembles in white, tangerine, light blue, raspberry and gold on a single day. As usual, the state banquet would require the Queen to wear the decoration bestowed on her by her host. Moore created a white beaded evening dress to offset the mustard sash, grand cross and collar of the Most Illustrious Order of the Royal House of Chakri.

  By now the mantle of Bobo had passed to the new dresser, Angela Kelly, another close confidante and straight-talking guardian of the royal wardrobe, who would show great talent as a designer in her own right. It was Miss Kelly (whom the Queen calls ‘Angela’) who would come up with what the Queen has described as her ‘very useful dress’, and what others at the Palace call ‘credit-crunch couture’. For a number of state occasions the Queen has had the same dress redesigned with different emblems to suit the location – such as maple leafs in Canada and national birds in the Caribbean. Other outfits are simply recycled. One favourite dusky-pink Angela Kelly coat trimmed with plum has been seen on at least a dozen different occasions.

  Fashion commentators have been unkind at some stages of the Queen’s reign. More recently, though, her obvious confidence in her personal style – like her loyalty to her Walsall-made Launer handbags and her London-made Rayne shoes, with their square heels (better for spreading the pressure on the foot) – would see off her critics. During the Queen’s 2000 state visit to Italy, she attended a Milan reception for clothing-industry giants including Prada, Krizia, Fendi, Missoni and Ferré. Nervous Palace press officials attempted to keep British reporters away from the fashion gods, for fear of withering remarks. Fortunately for the Queen, they failed. The brand names were unstoppable in their praise. ‘She is so perfect in the clothes she wears,’ was the verdict of Gianfranco Ferré on the Queen’s silver-blue dress and jacket by Karl-Ludwig Rehse with a matching straw hat by Philip Somerville. ‘The Queen is above fashion,’ proclaimed Mariuccia Krizia. ‘She is, simply, one of the most elegant women in the world,’ concurred Miuccia Prada.

  Other trusted designers of recent years include milliner Rachel Trevor-Morgan and designer Stewart Parvin. ‘She has an amazing complexion which means I can put her in any colour,’ Parvin has said, although the Queen tends to choose colours that help her stand out. As she once told a milliner: ‘I can’t wear beige because people won’t know who I am.’ She was not being vain. As the Countess of Wessex has pointed out, it is out of consideration for the public: ‘Don’t forget, when she turns up somewhere, the crowds are ten, fifteen deep – and somebody wants to be able to say that they saw a bit of the Queen’s hat as she went past. She needs to stand out for people to be able to say: “I saw the Queen”.’ Ahead of the Diamond Jubilee of 2012, Vogue magazine carried out a survey of the Queen’s clothes over a twelve-month period and discovered a marked preference for shades of blue (29 per cent), followed by floral (13) and green and cream (both 11).

  The Queen is also very conscious of the need for her tour wardrobe to hang well. Angela Kelly is adept at finding fabrics and designs that do not show creases. On those occasions when her clothes have been caught in a downpour, she has preferred to dry out standing up, knowing that sitting down will increase the chance of creasing. Stewart Parvin has said that he learned an important tip from his predecessors. He buys small lead weights from the curtain department at Peter Jones and sews them into the royal hemlines, not only to maintain the shape of the Queen’s clothes, but to prevent what would now be called a ‘wardrobe malfunction’. During the 1963 tour of New Zealand, a gust of wind raised the royal skirt in the capital and created ‘Windy Wellington’ headlines around the world. The photographer Reginald Davis captured the moment for the British press – ‘it only showed her slip’ – yet when he submitted it for the 1963 Photographer of the Year awards, the judges refused to accept it, on grounds of taste. In 1991 exactly the same thing happened as the Queen arrived in Namibia, and her skirt was caught in a gust as she descended from her plane. The wind has been an occupational hazard on tour for most of her reign. However, the lead weights have served her well.

  THE PRESS

  They might periodically infuriate diplomats and Palace officials but the Queen has always understood the role of the media on her travels. A regular fixture at the start of most royal tours would be the media reception, at which all the press covering the visit would be invited to down their cameras and notebooks and spend an hour or so meeting the Queen and the Duke privately. In the early years of the reign there would even be a pre-tour press reception at Buckingham Palace (without a royal presence), which could become so well refreshed that a 1961 gathering ended with photographers racing their cars around the Palace quadrangle.

  Despite the best efforts of local security forces, ardent royalists and more deferential elements at the Foreign Office to obstruct the media over the years, in the belief that they are doing the Queen some sort of favour, the Royal Family do not actually want the press excluded from their travels. There might be occasions when the Royal Family wish the ground would swallow up the press enclosure. The Duke of Edinburgh would have periodic run-ins with the press for most of his life, going back to the eve of his 1947 wedding, when he and his friends ripped the flashbulbs from the photographers’ cameras outside his Dorchester Hotel stag party. However, the Royal Family know that there is little point promoting Britain overseas if no one knows they are there. In his confidential despatch on the 1991 state visit to the USA, the British Ambassador, Sir Antony Acland, reminded his Foreign Office colleagues: ‘Those arranging a visit and those reporting it have a shared interest in obtaining as full coverage for the visit as possible.’ Giving the press ‘at least one good story each day’, he advised, ‘kept them busy and discouraged them from looking for silly stories to which they might otherwise have resorted.’

  In the early years of the reign, royal officials were fond of quoting Walter Bagehot’s Victorian warning that ‘we must not let in daylight upon magic’, and yet the Queen is equally fond of saying, ‘I have to be seen to be believed.’ She and her Private Secretaries are mindful of another great Victorian, Lord Salisbury. ‘Seclusion is one of the few luxuries in which royal personages may not indulge,’ the future Prime Minister wrote. ‘The power which is derived from affection or from loyalty needs a life of almost unintermitted publicity to sustain it.’As the Queen’s wiser advisers have always acknowledged, the greatest threat to the institution is not republicanism but irrelevance and indifference.

  The balance between what the press would call ‘public interest’ and what the Palace old guard would call ‘intrusion’ continues to be in flux. For the first sixteen years of her reign, the Queen’s press secretary was Commander Richard Colville, DSC, an Old Harrovian ex-Royal Navy officer who made little attempt to disguise his contempt for the press, let alone to woo them. ‘I am not what you North Americans would call a public relations officer,’ he once declared, getting another tour off to a winning start. As Philip Murphy, Professor of British and Commonwealth History at the University of London, has pointed out, the press were not the only people who found Colville exasperating. In September 1948, the Colonial Office was arranging a conference of African leaders in London and the Permanent Under-Secretary asked if the delegates might be photographed with the King. Colville sniffily responded that this was impossible and would set a dangerous precedent. The Colonial Office went straight over Colville’s head and complained to the Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles. It was pointed out that, since the King had been happy to pose for a recent photograph with the Australian cricket team, it would go down extremely badly if he could not bring himself to do the same with the African leaders. The King agreed and the Colonial Office was happy to report ‘considera
ble fervour and loyalty’ in the colonies, following publication.

  Colville would remain in post for more than twenty years, before retiring in 1968. Ahead of his departure, the Foreign Office produced a withering report on the Palace’s lack of imagination and its feeble efforts with the international media. George Littlejohn Cook, the head of the Foreign Office’s information department, wrote that ‘severe restrictions on press and photographers’ and dull engagements ‘tend to produce a certain degree of apathy and a feeling that “we’ve seen it all before”.’ He cited a serious lack of media interest in the Queen’s 1965 state visit to Belgium. The derisory coverage had offended the hosts and ‘was not commensurate with the great efforts expended both by us and by the Belgians’.

  Worse still was the fact that Colville allowed ‘practically no press photography at the Palace’, to the point that the only picture taken of a visiting prime minister from the Congo was of the back of the man’s head. ‘What are really required are warm, friendly informal pictures showing the Queen and Duke tête-à-tête with their guests,’ he wrote. The official royal photographs for Foreign Office distribution were so out of date that they showed the Queen with just three children (omitting Prince Edward, born in 1964).

  However, the cumulative effect of the cultural, political and social changes on public life during the Sixties had not gone unnoticed at the Palace. Television was becoming more popular while deference was heading the other way. In 1968, the Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (the ceremonial department of Buckingham Palace) finally gave up his historic role as censor of all theatre productions, an anomaly dating back to 1737. The Comptroller and his team were somewhat relieved. Even ardent royalists had to admit that it should not be left to a retired Army officer at the Palace to adjudicate on dramatic depictions of God or homosexuality or police corruption. In that same year, the Queen promoted Colville’s deputy, that unstuffy Australian ex-civil servant, to replace the Commander. Originally talent-spotted by the Australian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, William Heseltine had an intuitive grasp of the importance of both tradition and of public relations. Colour television had just arrived and both Prince Charles and Princess Anne were about to enter mainstream public life. Heseltine was alert to the dangers of the Monarchy slipping apart from the society it was there to represent. Over at the Foreign Office, there were many who could not wait to see the back of the man the press called the ‘Abominable “No” Man’.

  Concluding his report, Littlejohn Cook wrote: ‘The image which we are presenting of a modern Monarchy is central to our whole effort to project the right image of Britain of today overseas, not only in the Commonwealth but in the sophisticated European and American markets.’ His one hope, he said, was that ‘the appointment of Mr Heseltine as Press Secretary may usher in a new era’.

  Heseltine would certainly do things differently. He would oversee the first royal television documentary, Royal Family, and frequently had to deal with local media who had never encountered royalty before. One of his most vivid memories, he says, is still the Queen’s 1971 state visit to Turkey, as the Turkish photographers ran riot ahead of a trip to Ephesus. ‘I addressed them from the stage of the amphitheatre in Ephesus, from where Paul had preached to the Ephesians!’ he says. Unlike St Paul, Heseltine had a rather simpler message: if the photographers would only congregate on one side of the auditorium, they would all get a photograph of the Queen and the Duke on the other. And it worked.

  The graph line of Palace–press relations continued to climb once again through the Seventies and Eighties, as the Royal Family kept expanding in number, giving Britain something to cheer about during a turbulent political period. Then the graph line crashed. Few remember that 1992 was actually the Queen’s Ruby Jubilee. She herself called it her ‘annus horribilis’ – a year of marital dramas, public debates about the royal finances and then the Windsor Castle fire. Five years later, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales would mark the low point in royal relations with the media. At the public service to mark the Queen’s golden-wedding anniversary three months later, Palace hostility towards the media was such that the British press was allocated a single seat in a congregation of 2,000. The Golden Jubilee of 2002, however, would mark the start of a new era of workmanlike coexistence, which has continued to the present, through three royal weddings (those of the Prince of Wales and both his sons) and the Diamond Jubilee.

  On every tour, to the eternal dismay of the Foreign Office, the media might easily be more interested in the trivia than in the grand bilateral strategy. Food has often been a distraction, particularly the roasted gibnut – a jungle rodent – served by the Governor-General of Belize in 1985 (prompting ‘Queen eats rat’ headlines) and the sea slug served a year later in China. On the 2000 state visit to Italy, the Queen’s tour of Rome’s ancient Forum was eclipsed by the fact that she was served goat by the Italian Prime Minister. There were no complaints from the Queen. Her staff always advise against shellfish and spicy or messy food, but she could be forgiven for wanting the occasional note of variety on tour. Yet the menus seldom change from one decade to the next. The Queen’s lunch with her High Commissioners on her 1963 tour of Australia (‘Scotch salmon, breast of chicken’) was little different from her 1970 lunch in Botany Bay, Australia (‘Cold salmon, braised lamb’) or her 2000 lunch in Ballarat, Australia (‘Tasmanian salmon, loin of lamb’). Another unchanging feature of every royal tour would be the drinking water – always Malvern Water, regardless of the calibre of the local water supply. On longer tours, whenever possible, there would also be a barbecue, cooked by Prince Philip, with the Queen on salad duty. Offers of help would not be welcome.††

  TEAMWORK

  Though the Queen will receive all sorts of gifts on her travels, she will bring many of her own, both for her hosts and for the staff, ‘She is very attentive on gifts,’ says one official. It was entirely down to the Queen when it came to picking the gift for the Queen of Spain during King Felipe’s 2017 state visit to Britain. ‘It was her choice of a Burberry scarf for Queen Letizia. She said: “She is a very fashionable young woman” and she asked to look through a selection.’

  There can be a lot of present-buying to do ahead of a big tour. On her 1996 state visit of Thailand, for example, the Queen was presented with silks and gold. In return, she gave the King a sterlingsilver charger dish, engraved with royal ciphers, along with a Crown Derby tea service for Queen Sirikit. There were other members of the family to remember, too. For the Thai Crown Prince – something of a bon viveur – there was a pair of claret jugs. For Princess Sirindhorn, a well-known academic, there was an Edwardian inkstand and an original copy of Alan Turing’s groundbreaking article on artificial intelligence. One Palace veteran recalls how much the Queen has enjoyed giving toys to the children of her hosts, be it the offspring of the erratic King Hassan of Morocco, or Justin, the ‘very lively’ young son of her fourth Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau. Years later, the same boy would become her twelfth Canadian Prime Minister, saluting her at the 2015 Commonwealth summit as a ‘constant presence in the life of Canada’, who had ‘seen more of Canada than almost any Canadian’.

  As well as gifts, the Queen has enjoyed adding personal touches to her itinerary – a card and cake on a host’s birthday, for example. During her 1976 state visit to Luxembourg, she held a dinner to thank the Grand Duke for his hospitality and had a little surprise. The Anglophile Grand Duke had served with the British during the war and was immensely proud of his honorary position as Colonel of the Irish Guards. When dinner was over, the Queen suddenly produced the regimental pipers of the Irish Guards to perform around the table. ‘The Grand Duke couldn’t believe it,’ says Sir Antony Acland, the British Ambassador at the time. ‘He said: “Those are my pipers!” If one could organise touches like that, which were personal to the head of state, it meant a great deal.’ Sir Antony would observe the power of the pipes once again while serving as British Ambassador to the United States d
uring the Queen’s 1991 state visit to Washington. Among the presents for her host was a new piece of music which her piper, Jim Motherwell, had composed in President George Bush’s honour. The Queen had named it after the recent Allied victory in the Gulf War. Reporting back to the Foreign Office, Acland noted that Bush had been ‘genuinely delighted with the pipe march “Desert Storm” (for which its surprised composer and performer, Pipe Sergeant Motherwell, received a handwritten note from the President the next morning.)’

  The vast majority of presents on any royal visit would be for the staff and officials who had made it all happen. The inventory of gifts for the 1963 tour of Australia and New Zealand ran to several pages, including an engraved silver cigarette box for Lady Menzies, the wife of the Australian Prime Minister; an ashtray for Ernest Veniard, the royal butler in Adelaide; a book on George III’s Merino sheep for the chairman of the New Zealand Wool Board; even a scarf for the Queen’s chambermaid at the Grand Hotel, Dunedin. On state visits there would also be decorations for the British diplomats involved in the visit. Diplomats usually receive their honours via the Foreign Office’s Order of St Michael and St George but on these occasions they come from the monarch herself, via the Royal Victorian Order. It means, as a general rule, that any diplomats with the letters VO after their name will have helped organise a royal visit at some point. Heads of mission in a large country have usually received a knighthood, becoming a knight commander (KCVO) or dame commander (DCVO); in a smaller country, the ambassador might become a commander (CVO). For the next rungs down on the diplomatic ladder there would be the LVO (lieutenant) and MVO (member).